


Something like a Fall

by Anna__S



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-05
Updated: 2014-09-05
Packaged: 2018-02-16 05:11:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2257059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anna__S/pseuds/Anna__S
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was never going to be anybody other than Felicity Smoak</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something like a Fall

**Author's Note:**

> Notes: With thanks to Vonnie, who was responsible for this nearly every step along the way. Except for all the mistakes, which are wholly mine. Spoilers through all aired episodes but nothing for Season Three.
> 
> Hello new fandom.

She grew up outside of the city limits, close enough to keep her mother's commute short and far enough away to remember that you were living in a desert.  When she thinks of her childhood, she thinks of red rocks and bright flashing lights.

It was an improbable place to call home, particularly for somebody so clearly destined to be a geek. 

Her mother recognized that to her classmates, her daughter was basically an alien living in a girl’s body, but she tried to help Felicity find a way to fit in. She taught her how to mix prints and apply eyeliner, how to curl her hair so it fell into a perfect swingy ponytail. In her kinder moments, Felicity can even admit that her mother did the best she could.

The thing was, she had read the books, watched the movies, and she knew that nobody except for people destined to be townies and weathergirls fit in during high school. If she hadn’t been so lonely, it would have been a relief. The only part of Las Vegas she really loved was the casino. You would’ve thought, given what her father was, that she would’ve hated gambling, but a passion for cards was the only gift he ever gave her.  

And she loved the casino version of herself.  She always hoped that someday she would stand up, and this braver, more confident, less chatty Felicity would come away with her, but it was only ever a disguise.

   

* * *

 

If she didn’t quite fit in at MIT either, she didn’t _not_ fit in, and she felt more at ease there, less like a crayon that had been put in the wrong box. And being a blonde girl, even a bottle-blonde girl, in a sea of male nerds had its perks.

Sonam, her freshman year roommate, was a tall Indian girl, who was whip-smart and all legs, like a comma. Felicity taught her how to make long island iced teas, and Sonam introduced Felicity to her first taste of hacking. 

Computers became a kind of Pandora’s box; there was no information she couldn’t get, and it was hard to resist the desire not to know even the things she knew she didn’t want to know: her ex-boyfriend’s Facebook messages, her mother’s credit history, her father’s latest wedding license.

Here at last was a competitive sport she could get behind. She liked that it was less precise than coding, closer to a sparring match that required you to think on your feet. 

  

* * *

 

The Newsweek article on the disappearance of the Queens Gambit was the very first thing that came up when she googled Queen Consolidated in preparation for her job interview there. It was also the first time she ever saw Oliver Queen’s name.

The story, with its irresistible blend of soap opera and tragedy must have made it to Vegas too, but she had no recollection of it.

When they find him, she’s in the cafeteria at the office, a french fry halfway between her plate and her mouth, while her co-workers debate the different versions of Game of Thrones. 

The TV is playing a tennis match, when the breaking news bulletin cuts through. 

 A frazzled looking local news anchor shows a photo of him from his younger days. Rich _and_ handsome, of course, some people have all the luck, she thinks. Well, maybe not all the luck, she amends, as an image of Oliver with long, matted hair and a still raw wound peeking out from his shirt flashes across the screen. 

“Holy shit,” she says to Beth, her older co-worker, who remembers the Queen family from before their made for TV movie days. “That’s insane. I wonder where he’s been?”

Beth shrugs and snags a fry off her plate. “Knowing Oliver Queen, he probably spent the last five years in a brothel in Thailand.”

Felicity snorts.  “Maybe we’ll see him here.”

Now it’s Beth’s turn to laugh. “I’m pretty sure that this is the last place you’ll ever find him.” 

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t go to the church service, just the burial. She isn’t a complete idiot.  She makes sure to lurk an appropriate distance away from the tight knot of people standing by the coffin. Felicity even kneels down next to the tombstone closest to her, fingering the letters etched into the stone as she drops the spray of flowers she had the foresight to bring.

She watches as the son kicks petulantly at the grass.

 _We murdered his father in cold-blood_ , she repeats to herself. She tries to imagine all those small details that always seem the most important in retrospect: the last meal they might have shared together or the tie he had been wearing when the Hood smashed through his window. 

She tracks his widow out of the corner of her eye and waits to feel something, but all she can think about is the dull ache in her knees and the persistent glare of the sun. 

When the ceremony looks like it’s starting to wrap up, she stands up, brushing off her skirt, and walks back to her car. In the parking lot, she comes to a sudden stop.

Oliver Queen is leaning against her passenger door, his arms crossed across his chest, his hands jammed into his biceps.

“Oliver,” she says, wishing she didn’t sound so breathy.  “How, how did you know I was here?”

“I put a GPS tracker on your car,” he says.  Her mouth opens and closes, but before she can stutter out an angry rant, he raises his hands in an I-come-in-peace gesture. “I’m kidding.  I guessed.”

“You guessed?” she repeats, still suspicious. 

“I did the same thing, when I first came back,” he admits. “I promised myself that if the Vigilante was going to finish my father’s list, I had to be able to fully live with the consequences.” 

Felicity nods, watching his face warily.  She had decided to trust him despite the fact that he spends his nights shooting arrows into strangers while wearing a costume, but that doesn’t mean she’s abandoned all her common sense, just parts of it.  

“I understand why you came here today, Felicity, but please don’t do it again,” he says.  He always says her name so precisely, as if it contains information that is absolutely crucial to his meaning. 

“I won’t,” she says and it's true.  All this outing had given her was grass stains on her second-favorite black skirt and a pang of homesickness.

“How did you get here?” she asks and he shrugs, as if this too is need-to-know information. But then after a beat, he admits Thea dropped him off nearby. 

“You want a ride?” she asks,  “I should warn you that there’s still a pretty big blood stain in the back because I can’t figure out how to explain it to my mechanic.”

“Sorry about that. I can give you the number for a guy who specializes in that type of...removal,” he offers as she unlocks the door and swings it open.  

“Can I ask you something?” she says, but doesn’t wait for him to answer. “That night, why did you come to my car? Why me?” 

“Because I trusted you,” he says.  “Why did you trust me?”

“I don’t know,” she admits.  She doesn’t say, _because I’ve been waiting my entire life for something interesting to happen to me._

 As she slides the key into the ignition, she asks, "are you sure there's no tracker on this car? Because if I were you, that's the first thing I would've done."  

 "You're a little scary, Felicity," he says, which seems a bit _much_  coming from him.  

He looks at her and he doesn’t say anything else, but he smiles a warm smile that makes his eyes go soft, that make it easy to forget they were crashing the funeral of a man he had killed.  

* * *

 

In their office that she’s not allowed to call a lair, she tries not to hum, _Oliver Queen, he’s making a list, gonna find out who’s naughty or nice_ , because it seems disrespectful even if it is catchy as hell.  She frankly, never fully understands where the magical list originated, or what exactly it takes to get on said list. 

But, in the end, she either puts her faith in Oliver and in them or she doesn’t. 

And she does, even when she isn’t sure she should. Even when his Hood growl tinges his voice during the daylight hours; when he asks Felicity to track down the bank account information of a beloved local leader and refuses to tell her why; when he barely seems to trust himself.

She trusts him, deep down in her bones, and she hopes she figures out why. She thinks maybe it has something to do with how he says her name; how he always expects her to come through for him; how she always does. 

  

* * *

 

The first six months are a jittery blur, ricocheting between unbelievable highs and previously unknown lows.  Felicity hasn’t drunk this much red bull since her college finals. She spends a medium-sized fortune on under-eye concealer. 

Her co-workers wonder, in faux hushed tones if she’s developed a drug addiction or fallen too deep into some shady online hobby – and although they are not entirely wrong on either front, she offers up chronic migraines as a sufficiently mundane, plausible explanation.  She discusses headache cures so often that it occasionally feels like the truth. 

She wishes Oliver noticed how much work goes into her double life, without the benefit of a trust fund. It also occasionally bothers her that nobody seems concerned with the number of people, including cop-type people, who know her face, but then it’s not as if the Vigilante’s costume is foolproof.  

And she supposes an IT girl wearing a mask would be a special kind of absurdity. Although not the most absurd thing she’s seen this year.

At her real job, her brain is hazy and her eyes feel like somebody has attached weights to them.  She fantasizes constantly about napping in an actual bed with an actual pillow during actual human sleeping hours. But then night rolls around, and Diggle is there, with an encouraging smile, coffee in hand, and the adrenaline kicks in.  She loves to work to the sounds of the sharp thwacks and thuds of their sparring intermingled with the familiar rhythm of her fingers tap-tapping on the keyboard.

“We don’t know what we’d do without you,” they are careful to say, sincerely and often, and it’s a better jolt than the five-hour-energy bottles Oliver secretly hoards or even the occasional brush with death.

She thinks of her MIT classmates, building dating apps in Palo Alto and writing ibanking code in New York, like identical working bees, and her resolve strengthens.

There’s only one Vigilante, and that means that there can only be one Felicity Smoak. 

  

* * *

 

The summer he leaves, she hacks into Oliver’s phone.  She isn’t particularly proud of it, especially since it’s her security protocol.   

Obviously she recognizes that it’s an invasion of his privacy and that if he knew Dig would raise an eyebrow at her and give her a disappointed lecture on the importance of boundaries. But she can’t resist. 

At night, she reads his old messages over and over, the way she used to read Jane Eyre. He is, in truth, terrible at texting.  He sounds just like her Uncle Steve, all full sentences and formal punctuation, like he’s crafting the world’s most boring telegrams. But the texts are so immediate, so _present_ that she can’t shake the feeling that she can pull him back from whatever void he’s disappeared into.  

“He’ll come home,” Dig promises, calling it Oliver’s vacation, as if describing it that way might make it true. But the truth is that neither of them understands him as well as they should.  And she knows a little something about being left behind. 

 When he does come back, she abandons his phone history without a word, but her fingers itch to go back, to know him in all of the ways he will never let her.

 

* * *

 

Felicity lets out a long sigh. “You know, they never tell you in the comics how _boring_ superhero stuff can be.”

She huffs again.  She and Diggle have already been waiting in this overly warm pipe room for fifteen minutes for Oliver to do his whatever it is he does, and she’s antsy and more than a little hungry, there’s no wireless, and Oliver refused to let her bring her tablet.  

“We should’ve brought playing cards,” she says. 

“Sorry, I forgot those,” Diggle says, but he reaches into a bag and pulls out – god bless his Boy Scout heart – snacks.

“Chips?” he offers and she nods enthusiastically, settling down next to him, indian-style.  

“You know, I had a date tonight. An actual date, with a guy, that probably wasn’t going to involve breaking and entering." She pauses, waiting a beat, “it probably would’ve been a disaster.” 

“Well, you can have an equally disastrous date tomorrow,” offers Dig and for not the first time, Felicity wishes that somebody in their little band of maybe-superheroes was better at girl talk. 

Through her earpiece, she can hear the sounds of muffled fighting, and more distinctly, Oliver’s low, uneven breathing.  To distract herself, she asks Dig if he’s ever considered what his hero codename would be.

“Can’t say I have, any ideas?” he asks. 

She swallows the last of her chips – sour cream, slightly stale – and looks at him contemplatively. 

“Based on precedent, I would say…Muscles.”

He smiles smugly and she punches him, hard, on his yes, very muscly shoulder.

“Which I guess would make me Computer…or Wires? Ugh,” she says. “That’s terrible. Although I guess, what does a black canary have to do with anything?”

 “I can’t imagine you being anything but Felicity,” says Dig. 

“That’s a compliment,” he adds, nudging her gently on the shoulder. 

 “Hmm,” she says, skeptical.    

The room is dark, and hot, like a musty cocoon. She leans her head against Dig’s shoulder and lets herself close her eyes. 

When she opens them, Oliver is staring down at them, his expression a cross between annoyance and amusement, which is a look she wishes she could pull off, but probably can’t.  She jerks up from Dig’s shoulder, noting with horror, that yup, that’s definitely drool.   

“You guys planning on helping me out any time soon?” Oliver asks.  

“Sorry!” she says, taking his offered hand, “but maybe next time you shouldn’t leave us stranded in a dark room for hours on end.”

“Okay, next time I’ll try knocking out two dozen guards on a schedule that's more convenient for you,” he retorts, but he’s wearing his I’m-amused-even-though-I-have-to-pretend-I’m-not-to-protect-my-oh-so-serious-reputation expression.

Her legs have gone numb, and as she stands up, she sways and has to grab onto Oliver like a life raft.  He wraps his gloved hand around her waist to steady her and something warm and liquid curls in her gut.  Without looking, she knows that Dig is laughing, and she makes a mental note to call him Muscles for at least a week. 

“Ready to work?” asks Oliver and like a light’s been switched, he’s suddenly in Hood mode, or Arrow mode, or whatever he’s calling himself this week mode.

She nods. 

  

* * *

 

Their schemes always seem to end in her leaping off something.  They claim it’s just a coincidence, but she can’t help picturing Dig and Oliver making plans and realizing oh no, that won’t do, Felicity was going to get to keep both feet on the ground, better re-think things. 

So, here she is again, tiptoeing up to the ledge and cursing Diggle for getting stuck five stories down.  She can see him below now, an indistinct blur jumping into the night. 

Felicity waits a few seconds, trying to steady her breathing. 

She pulls on the rope attached to her backpack, and feels a frisson of panic run through her as it uncoils at her feet.

“Oliver,” she says in horror, her voice barely audible to her own ears. “Oliver, the line is broken.”

 _Time to do that rescue the damsel in distress thing they pay you the big bucks for_ , she wants to say, calm, cool and collected, like she does this every day, like she’s Sara, but her voice has retreated. 

She stares over the edge, to the dark ground thirty floors away.  The steps are close enough to hear clearly now, echoing beneath the roof, heavy footsteps from security guards who are almost certainly armed with black guns she’s never bothered to learn the name of. 

It is both painful and deeply irritating to imagine how sad and how validated her mother will feel when she dies on the top of an office building halfway through a heist with a masked vigilante. _I tried to keep her out of the casinos and off the computer, but she never listened_ , she would tell her friends. 

“Felicity, you know there’s a second shoot. Grab the back-up line,” Oliver says in a soft but commanding tone that almost hides the edge of panic in his voice.

Her hands shake as she reaches back and her fingers clutch tightly around the line. 

“I found it,” she says, her voice still quaking. Felicity feels completely unbalanced, as if her body is suddenly too heavy for her legs.  She resists the urge to drop down into a tight crouch. 

She inches closer to the ledge, not trusting her traitorous legs. 

“Felicity, you have to jump!” says Oliver.

She closes her eyes and she jumps. 

 

* * *

 

Sara turns out to be an excellent and patient trainer.  She teaches Felicity how to use her opponent’s size to her advantage and how to punch with the whole weight of her body. 

Felicity can feel herself becoming stronger, in a way that’s different from her yoga classes or her treadmill.  If this was an eighties movie montage, the soaring music would be starting to kick in. Okay, so she knows she’ll never be a hired gun or merit an alias in an exotic tongue, but maybe she will be able to defend herself and to stop getting kidnapped in some embarrassing fashion at every possible opportunity. 

“You should’ve seen me when I started,” Sara says a few weeks before she leaves, a half-smile on her face. 

Felicity wonders what pleasant memory could possibly be associated with her time as an indentured assassin for hire, but restrains herself. Sara was not generally a chatty teacher, which Felicity appreciates.  God only knows what things would escape from her fool mouth otherwise. Although actually she has some ideas of what it might be.  

It’s a surprise when Sara continues. “Actually, you should’ve seen Oliver before the island. You could’ve taken him in a heartbeat.”

“I can’t imagine it,” she admits. Even thought she’s watched more than a few videos, buried deep in long-lost caches.  

“He was different.  Kinder in some ways.  But more selfish.  You guys, this work you do, I think it brings out the best version of him.”

Felicity has halted her punches, but the heavy bag hangs between them, and her hands are still balled into fists.  A thick strand of bright hair has slipped out of Sara’s ponytail, and she suddenly looks very young and very out of place. 

“Sometimes, when you’ve spent a long time trying to figure out how to be somebody else, you need other people to remind you who you are, you know what I mean?” 

Felicity nods, quite literally biting back the questions she wants to ask, her teeth cutting into her bottom lip, feeling like some sort of important responsibility she doesn’t quite understand has passed between them. 

“Now, start again, and tuck your elbow in this time.” 

When Sara leaves, she keeps the lessons up with Dig.  She was tempted to ask Oliver, but she suspected it would trigger all of his most irritating brotherly instincts. As if learning to defend herself was the thing that put her at risk.

 This plan works out mostly well until Dig has to take a night off for Lamaze classes and Oliver shows up without even being asked, so, so much for her attempts at secrecy. 

He isn’t quite as patient a teacher as Diggle or Sara, although she supposes neither of them were so fundamentally distracting. When he places his hands on the hips of her yoga turned fighting pants, just below the exposed slice of skin, and shows her how to shift her weight, a zing of something that is either anxiety or pleasure runs through her.

He also can’t help but snort – and seriously she would pay a lot of money for a video of Oliver making that noise – at the fierce way her face twists up when she kicks. 

Felicity struggles to imitate the fluid way his body moves, proud of herself for only being slightly distracted by the fine sheen of sweat in the V of his chest. 

Her fists fly at the bag as she feels the now familiar thud against her knuckles.  There will be bruises in the morning, but she keeps swinging.   When she finally stops, her breathing is ragged, and Oliver is looking at her with a furrowed brow. 

“How was that?” she asks, still slightly out of breath.  Sweat drips into her eyes and she can only imagine what it’s doing to her make-up. 

Oliver takes one step towards her, and she instinctively closes her eyes as he leans forward, gently wiping away a smudge of something from under her eye with the pad of his thumb.

When she opens her eyes, he’s still bent down near her face, a few inches too close for comfort. She realizes one split second before it happens that holy shit, he’s going to kiss her, and then before she can process this improbable development, he presses his lips against hers. 

It’s so soft; it’s almost as if he’s giving her an opportunity to walk away without consequences, to pretend that this is nothing more than a kiss on the cheek gone awry. 

But Felicity immediately butts her head forward, so that her mouth is on his, his teeth suddenly on her lips, her nose bumping awkwardly into his.  Oliver takes her face in his palms, deepening the kiss, pulling her fully flush against him. 

His hands move down her hips to her ass, pausing there, and it feels like a green light for her to run her fingers up his chest. She has spent more time than she wants to admit contemplating the strong lines of his back and the definition of his hipbone, but this is finally her chance to get to know all the parts of him that have always been forbidden.

Her cheeks burn where his shorn beard is rubbing against them. She kisses down his jawline, noting the muffled groan he makes when she reaches his neck, feeling the raised, jagged edge of his scar under her tongue as she reaches the top of his chest. His skin tastes salty and sharp. 

He hikes her up effortlessly, carrying them both backwards until her ass makes contact with something solid as she wraps her legs around his waist. 

It isn’t until she accidentally kicks a hard-drive and it makes a noise like a dying cat that she realizes that she’s sitting on her computer desk and the reality of what they’re doing smacks her in the face, like cold water, or whatever it is people get smacked in the face with. 

She pulls away and places her hands on his stomach, creating a good six inches of space between them. It takes a truly heroic effort not to trace his abdominal muscles with her fingertips. 

“That was a good kiss,” she says, alarmed by the husky, second rate porn-star quality of her voice.

He looks equally undone. There are streaks of lipstick smeared across his face like a candy colored rash.  She feels a small thrill, knowing that she, Felicity Smoak, computer nerd, no capitalization needed, can leave Oliver Queen, Playboy Billionaire, panting. 

“Not that I thought you’d be a bad kisser, obviously you have lots of practice-“ she realizes that she has just basically called him whatever the guy version of slut was, but call it like you see it right, so she plunges forward, “but I had a lot of bad kisses growing up.”

"You see, I had a super long tongue as a kid. I mean, I still do. But it’s more proportional with my mouth. When I was little, I couldn't even pronounce my own name. I had to go to a speech therapist and say the word sandwich over and over. I mean it wasn't horrible; I wasn't Eliza Doolittle or anything. But then when I started kissing guys, it was kind of a problem, because a little tongue is nice, right, but nobody wants to choke on your tongue.”

Felicity had tried to bite back the words. _Pull it together, Smoak_. But she has gone down a tongue rabbit hole and there’s no going back. She can tell that he’s holding back a laugh.

“The word tongue is kind of a funny word,” she adds. 

His hands – and who knew people could have palms that big – curl around her waist.  He looks at her mouth as if he’s considering quieting her by kissing her again.

Her body is still vibrating, warmth shooting out from all the places he’s touched her. There’s a feeling in her stomach like she’s standing on a ledge that Oliver is about to make her jump off.  But this, she thinks, this she gets to choose.

"I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, but I don't think this is a good idea," she says.

He looks about as surprised as she feels. 

“I mean don’t get me wrong, I definitely want to keep kissing you,” she says,   "I just, I really care about what we're doing here.“ 

“I don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize this,” she finishes.

Meaning this, as in the mission, and this, as in them, but mostly _this_ , her home on their island of misfit heroes. 

She can feel her mouth winding up again, and he must sense it too, because he squeezes her hands before stepping back. She wishes he wasn’t still staring at her with such intent concentration, like it’s archery practice, and she’s the target, and that metaphor is frankly, a little too on the nose. 

“You’re right,” he says, “I’m sorry. This was…” he pauses as if he’s hunting for the right word, “impulsive. I hope I didn’t make you uncomfortable.”

“No, I’m very, very, _very_ comfortable,” she says, a little too quickly.  “Please don’t think that’s what I meant. I just, Sara just left…you just lost your mom…Thea’s gone, everything is so unsettled. It doesn’t feel like the right time to shake up the status quo, you know?” The _neither of us can afford to lose anything else_ goes unspoken.

As a flash of anguish briefly crosses his face, she mentally kicks herself for this bone-headed litany of his losses. _Way to hit a guy when he’s down_ , _Felicity_.

But he nods, seems to understand that she’s saying _later_ and not _no_. That she wants to bet on them.

“Maybe when things are more normal,” he says.

“Are we talking billionaire playboy normal, marooned on a creepy island normal, or mask wearing vigilante normal?” she asks. 

“How about broke, former playboy and his crime-fighting partner normal?” he says. He smiles at her, and she smiles back, relieved that whatever just happened hasn’t broken their fundamental them-ness. 

“Ready for another round?” he asks, gesturing at the punching bag, and she nods and steps towards him. 

 

 

 


End file.
